Class 1 ~ A peek in Penelope's journal

As some of you, I do the same exercises you do, so I thought I'd share some of what I've done so far in my own journal. Firstly, the cover ~ which is the *only* thing I've managed to do in actual class time. You never need to finish whatever exercise we're doing actually *in* class time. Some of what we do needs quiet consideration, so feel free to work at your own pace. These blog posts will be here for you whenever you're ready.

And now, my cover. Here's how I did it: scraped acrylic paint, bit of yellow, but mostly that lovely iridescent blue-green we've all been playing with in class. Stencilled on top with two stencils, the lotus flower, and the radiating circle. I love how rotating the lotus flower upside down can turn it into a repeating pattern. The paint colour is a bit of a wobbly mix of purple. green and dark blue. I was re-using a sponge that already had paint on it and I liked the mix of colours. After the paint had dried, I coloured back into it with Tim Holtz Distress Crayons. If you look closely, you can also see that I spread some of the paint and crayons over onto the plain black and white duct tape reinforced spine as well. The only thing I regret is not doing the back cover at the same time ... that would have been smart. Oops. Oh well ... I can always go back and do it later ...

Here's the inside front cover. I glued in the schedule and the bits that always appear on page 1 of the handouts on top of a magazine ad for body wash. I used the things I glued in to cover the ad text ~ clever! I liked how the blues went together:

This next page was created by cutting up an ad with branches on it (mostly to eliminate the text), and then gluing in the list of journalling tools from the handouts, plus a quote about starting projects:

Sometimes I rewrite some of the handouts in my journal. Of course, you don't need to, but I find writing things out helps me to reinforce the information in my brain, and it also lets me add new ideas as I go along as well. In the handouts, this information was just about blank covers, but I rewrote it to include ideas for blank inside pages as well:

As I mentioned, I do the same exercises you do, so here's what I did for the Personal Values exercise. I glued in the envelopes in a stack and then wrote my five final values beside them. The "leftovers" envelope is for the second part of the exercise when you're reassessing your part one choices from the "very important" envelope. Just before I did the exercise, I was listening to an audiobook (Elan Mastai's "All Our Wrong Todays"), where the main character's sister believes that our values are not actually what we *say* they are, but how we are actually living our lives. It seems like a valid point, so I wanted to remember it for the next time I do the exercise:

One of my favourite things to do with the quotes from the handouts is to find a beautiful magazine image, cover a page with it and then "blend" the handout quotes into it. Although the handouts are black and white, adding colour (like with felt pens) can really tie them into the page beautifully. I also add washi tape and more colour to the image as well to bring it all together:

On this page, I coloured some of the words in the top yerllow, blue and green to make it stand out, and a yellow border as well. On the bottom quote, colouring the words yellow keeps them from getting lost, and I added a blue border. 

On this page, I coloured orange around the top quote to tie it into the flowerpot below, and in the quote at the bottom, I made the unicorn purple to match the flowers in the vases. There was some text I didn't want on the top right-hand edge ... so I covered it with part of the gravel from the bottom of the page that I cut off when I trimmed it to fit the page, and then I drew a frame around it so it looks like it might a mirror reflecting downward.

 I thought you might also like to know that ALL the images that I've used in my journal so far (for both classes 1 and 2) come from ONE SINGLE COPY of an Oprah magazine. If you remember during the class I said sometimes you have to turn things upside down and forget what they are so you can see the full potential of a colour, or a pattern, or some text. More on this in a later post!